flashke wrote:Solid start of the season, knee problems, wrong medical diagnosis, things got worse, double surgery in July and August solving the problem for his right knee, minor problem detected in his left knee that could cause problems in the future, so he decided to go for another surgery, instead of a comeback late September. Now everything should be fine for the future, he's feeling 100% physically, incredibly motivated to race again, and will try to secure a spot in the WT next season.

Squire wrote:That's a very strong-looking team, fauniera. You must be aiming for back to back victories. But curiously, no winner has ever done well the year after they won.

I'm a tiny bit annoyed that I'm not among those who can brag about predicting Cima for greatness. He was in my team through all of December, but got lost in the last-minute shuffle when I switched Moscon for Thomas.

Pogacar was on my radar, too. I was mightily impressed by his results last year, but with plenty of WT scorers in his price range, he was a tad too expensive for me.

I expect great things from Cima but did not pick him mainly because of his age. Still he's on my radar for next season

PeterB wrote:FUGLSANG Jakob 703 3 - Thanks to avoiding more expensive riders I had sufficient budget to select another high mid-range GC rider who I assumed would also be more popular, especially given the hype Danish riders tend to get here sometimes. After Aru's departure from Astana Fuglsang should solidify his GC leadership role. And there's also Innsbruck, where I hope he will be able to fight for medals in the RR.

I think this could be a great pick, and one I would have gone for if I'd put a bit more effort into selection! All the talk has been about Lopez (and rightly so to an extent given his Vuelta), but Fuglsang will outscore him pointswise i think. He reached a new level at the Dauphine last year and would easily have got 1000 points if he could have ridden for himself and finished a GT. Plus, he has huge potential for improvement in the spring.

How did you do this, Ferminal? I'd love to do the same, but instead of counting riders I'd like to count common points (e.g. '1 rider of 1000pts in common' is more similar than '2 riders of 100pts in common')

Jancouver wrote: ...while I was at some point also tempted by G, I left him out because he is turning 33 this year and is just too old to improve. Same for Songbird, turning 32 this year.

True that they are not getting younger. But both declared they intended to achieve something special this year and I tend to believe they are still capable of that. And even if not, both seem to have quite high base level so shouldn't completely disappoint.

And I just did not have courage to gamble on Gaudu or Latour or Oomen or even Moscon who are younger but so much more unpredictable and already quite expensive for this game.

NairoQ wrote:How did you do this, Ferminal? I'd love to do the same, but instead of counting riders I'd like to count common points (e.g. '1 rider of 1000pts in common' is more similar than '2 riders of 100pts in common')

I'm also content with Bennett getting 4th in the New Zealand nats. Although being one of the few WT riders, he obviously had no team, the course didn't really suit him and he had surgery this winter for something to do with chronic side stitch he'd apparently been suffering from. Nevertheless he made the front group and said he didn't really feel any side stitch. Doesn't mean too much yet, but it's about as good as I could have reasonably hoped for from a rare, somewhat expensive pick which I'm not 100% confident about.

I'm glad I missed no obvious picks, those I did not chose I did for one reason or another. I somewhat regret that I overlooked Haddi Soufiane and Bol Cees, but they are not popular.

A few words about my team:

ALAPHILIPPE Julian 1011 59 If he stays healthy and uninjured and rides a full season he might double his points. Can also be a contender at the Worlds and I like him.

MOSCON Gianni 864 21Massive talent, with Froome hopefully gone he should get more freedom in stage races and I guess he will lead Sky at the Classics with Van Baarle. Being at Sky he might even finish high at the Worlds.

THEUNS Edward 645 8I like him, he might double his points. I'm not really convinced though, I chose him over Cort as the latter was injured and Theuns will probably better fit in at Sunweb than Cort at Astana.

LOPEZ MORENO Miguel Angel 629 101 No brainer.

CHAVES RUBIO Jhoan Esteban 505 107 Can score high in 2 GTs and the Worlds.

ANDERSEN Søren Kragh 478 33 After a very good season this can be his breakout year. Bit risky though.

GAUDU David 352 61Massive talent, can double his points or stagnate this season.

CAVENDISH Mark 257 115Even on a downward slope he should at least double his points.

DE PLUS Laurens 239 17Chose him over Mas, probably not the best choice but he's got talent and should improve his score.

COQUARD Bryan 220 110 No brainer, I hope he's motivated for the french races.

VLIEGEN Loïc 179 7 I believed in him last year, I believe in him this year even more.

WÜRTZ SCHMIDT Mads 160 7After a good first year at WT I expect a better second year.

SIVAKOV Pavel 142 23 He's talented, I hope he gets a similar race program than Hart last year. Might probably also ride le Tour de l'Avenir.

PLANCKAERT Edward 121 3Chose him over Capiot as I didn't know if the latter is healthy again. Should improve his scores but I fear a healthy Capiot has a higher ceiling this year.

NARVAEZ PRADO Jhonatan Manuel 120 12Talented climber in a team with few climbers but not sure if he's a great pick.

JAKOBSEN Fabio 118 28Quickstep knows how to develop a sprinter, should get his chances in smaller races.

FERNANDEZ ANDUJAR Ruben 115 42After a bad year he can only be better and he is at Movistar so there's always the chance to score 400+ now that the Herrada brothers and Gorke are gone. Was my last pick as I'm not really convinced in him but he should do well in the TDU.

I know that some of you create your team by comparing expected returns of various combinations of riders. I don't do that because it seems to me this method is so imprecise and unreliable that it simply does not make sense to use it. But now that I have my team I estimated how many points I expect at the end of the year, if all goes as planned (i.e. cautiously optimistic scenario). I've got to 17400 points.

Anybody else willing to share their projections? It may be interesting to compare not only with reality at the end, but also to get an idea how many points a winning team may need this year.

PeterB wrote:I know that some of you create your team by comparing expected returns of various combinations of riders. I don't do that because it seems to me this method is so imprecise and unreliable that it simply does not make sense to use it. But now that I have my team I estimated how many points I expect at the end of the year, if all goes as planned (i.e. cautiously optimistic scenario). I've got to 17400 points.

Anybody else willing to share their projections? It may be interesting to compare not only with reality at the end, but also to get an idea how many points a winning team may need this year.

I predict that I am very bad at this game so a return of 9,750 for my team

PeterB wrote:I know that some of you create your team by comparing expected returns of various combinations of riders. I don't do that because it seems to me this method is so imprecise and unreliable that it simply does not make sense to use it. But now that I have my team I estimated how many points I expect at the end of the year, if all goes as planned (i.e. cautiously optimistic scenario). I've got to 17400 points.

Anybody else willing to share their projections? It may be interesting to compare not only with reality at the end, but also to get an idea how many points a winning team may need this year.

I'm going to predict I'm going to be bad at this game. If I finish mid pack I'll be happy.

I'll be back to discuss at length in the future, I'm sure, but feel free to pick it apart.

I have to say, besides your irrational trust in Grosu, it's the first time I'm scratching my head at some of your selections but first, I'll talk about your picks I really like. Obviously I like the riders we have in common (Lopez, Latour, Gaudu, Mas, Cavendish, Coquard, Fernandez, Navardauskas, Nizzolo, Guardini, Capiot, Craddock, König, Intxausti and Enger) but the reasoning behind most is pretty obvious so I'm not gonna spend a paragraph on them.

Kämna, Roelandts and Oomen were all on my first draft but when you come in at 9000pts you have to cut some riders. Oomen in particular I think is going to break through this year and I'm a bit annoyed to see him picked by so many top players. It just reinforces my belief that his omission is going to blow up right in my face. I never considered Chaves and I wish I had, with good health he's easily a 1000+ pts type of rider and for that price it's a very good pick.

I'm not a Mamykin fan but I think he's better than what he showed last year and he is in a better situation scoring wise this year. Good rare pick.

I like the Valverde choice. Nobody can deny his unique ability to rack up CQ points and for his price point, I'd want at least 2400 to feel really good about selecting him which feels very doable for a rider of his caliber. Still that's a tough ask for anybody turning 38 in the middle of the season. He has to drop off at some point right ? Even without accounting for age-based regression let's look at what his history tells us. He missed a big chunk of the season last year but that's not necessarily where does he does the most damage scoring wise and his start to the season went pretty much as well as you could hope. He scored 1329 pts pre TDF in 2016, 1654 in 2015 and 1458 in 2014 (obviously 1828 in 2017). That's 1567 pts on average. His last 3 TDF + Vuelta were 579 (2016), 883 (2015), 1094 (2014). There's definitely some slippage here. How much was due to racing the Giro in 2016, how does having Landa on top of Quintana affect his GC potential, how many points can he recoup from Contador's (and Froome's ?) absence ? Let's give him his average 852 pts (that seems a bit high to me). That leaves San Sebastian + Lombardia + the Worlds. 600 points in 2014, 399 in 2015, 212 in 2016. Again, his numbers are trending down later in the year (and he has good excuses like no Worlds in 2016 but that's a lot of evidence that's starting to rack up to suggest he has more trouble finishing seasons as he ages). Let's say he would have placed 5th in the Worlds in 2016 had he participated (not unreasonable given his track record at the event), his 2014-2016 average for the three races would be 456 pts. So looking at his performances 2014-2017, if he doesn't slip due to age and doesn't miss time he projects around 2875 pts which would make him a great pick. Honestly with Landa and Quintana on his team, I have a hard time seeing him as a big GC threat in the GTs so I had him more around 400-450 pts for Vuelta and TDF combined which put him right at the limit for consideration. In the end, I'm a bigger believer in the upside of Alaphilippe, Gaviria and Bardet than Valverde for the purpose of this game (plus I like them better) but he was the only other 1000+ pts riders I considered.

Haussler, Kangert, Van Poppel and Brambilla should bounce back and I expect them to be good picks but they are riders that I find difficult to get excited about.

Vendrame and Garcia Cortina didn't jump off the page to me. I would love to hear why you found them so appealing when there are plenty of other worthy options in their price range.

I had Doull last year but he seemed overwhelmed at the WT level and he looks more than a year away to me. Albanese was one of my worst picks last year. He's young and can improve but he was just so, so far away last year, I dont know where he's going to score points in the pros. I feel like there were more worthy gambles in that price range.

Can't say I'm too impressed with your crops of neo-pros though it's always a more difficult (and subjective) exercise than picking established riders. I don't know much about McNulty and Riabushenko but they don't scream special to me. I think Halvorsen is fast but I don't think he's strong enough to hang until the end of WT stages yet. I have zero trust in Sivakov translating his u23 results to the pros (right away).

Finally getting caught up in the thread enough to respond. I'll go into depth on my team choices rider by rider when I have the time, but I can answer a bit of background on the horse-trading aspect of the picks you've highlighted, like how I ended up picking them in the process.

As usual, astute CQ game analysts will find most questions about riders the chooser also waffled on. Valverde I kinda had to decide on early, so I won't talk about him much here (but take your points into consideration for when I do post about it). But as for my team, I locked in 25 riders relatively early - the last 8 were Kamna, Vendrame, Doull, Sivakov, Riabushenko, Mamykin, McNulty, Albanese. Basically, I made my team with the last 8 how I wanted it (with Formolo and Power in place of McNulty and Vendrame), and it was a bit over budget. I got rid of Formolo, because I talked myself out of him being an exciting pick (I reasoned that with Majka, Konig, Kennaugh, and the homegrown developing talents Buchmann and Muhlberger there might not be enough slices of the pie; plus I have considered Formolo pretty much every year he's been a pro and even though I really like him I felt like moving on this year), so he was the one that could go. The rider I didn't have that I was most excited to replace him with was McNulty, so I put him on. I had about 100 points under the limit now. The two guys I was least convinced that I had left on my roster were Riabushenko and Rob Power, so I looked for someone on my list that much above them and was really only left with Vendrame, who I had not seriously considered for my team prior to that, but considered more seriously than the other options in that range. Trading up Riabushenko would have left me two points over, so I just traded Power and was done with it. I toyed with ideas like doing multi trades (like dropping Intxausti for De Bie and someone else for someone else a bit higher) but you've gotta end the process at some point and that point was then for me.

Anyway, Vendrame - I haven't really followed him, never really rated him as a talent. But when I was collecting my longlist through my initial process (which involves going through the CQ list top to bottom for obvious picks, going through every team to look for riders' year-over-year and fit, going through the transfer list, looking at interviews) I saw some things I liked and flagged him for later. Assessing a rider usually has a number of considerations for me, including: potential floor, potential ceiling, development/aging, team switch, team fit, etc. For Vendrame, he's got these things going for him:

- scored 200 points in his neo-pro season- entering age 24 season, which is a likely time for a leap- has had some pretty good consistency in lumpy finales; not another obvious candidate that Androni would work for other than Gavazzi- got a handful of results bigger than 10 points, but they were spread out, in mid-March, early May, early June, and October.

So, I think his floor is quite high, like he was consistent this year, not lucky, so 200 points as a baseline should be replicable. Add in development with age and learning how to ride in a peloton after the first year in the pros, and you can add 100-200 more points maybe. If he gets lucky or hits at the right time and an attack sticks, that can be 80 to 140 points right there in a 1.1 or 1.HC race, on top of other consistent results. And everyone's dream in a rider is that they go on the form of their life for a while and rip off some consecutive results. Androni's calendar is well situated for a rider to take advantage of this, as the .1 and .HC races come thick and fast. Of course, if they go to the Giro and he's selected, that's likely 21 race days of wasted points. But in the end I was like 'sure, why not' for my last pick. And, I believe he's the only unique pick I've ever had in this game! So that's great. Go Andrea!

Eep I've now spent several paragraphs nerding out over rider selection process and have run out of time for this post. Okay, full explanations of my riders coming out in the next few days after the update. I'm back at home now, and the game's getting underway, so I'll be caught up on this thread soon.

Changes I have made:Fixed the "Rankings tab" so that it has 128 teams (you had accidentally included "the attacking vikings" but this was reading info from "the asian"'s team.Finished the following tabs: "Popularity table", "Rank popularity" and "All_riders"

Edit - I also fixed the issue Armchair cyclist has raised

Hey, didn't have the chance to get to this in the last few days, so just wanted to say now thanks alot for fixing it up! I'll definitely use this info and integrate it with the other couple of changes I made adding the teams and changes that were overlooked in my PMs. But yeah, thanks alot!

PeterB wrote:I know that some of you create your team by comparing expected returns of various combinations of riders. I don't do that because it seems to me this method is so imprecise and unreliable that it simply does not make sense to use it. But now that I have my team I estimated how many points I expect at the end of the year, if all goes as planned (i.e. cautiously optimistic scenario). I've got to 17400 points.

Anybody else willing to share their projections? It may be interesting to compare not only with reality at the end, but also to get an idea how many points a winning team may need this year.

I'm going to predict I'm going to be bad at this game. If I finish mid pack I'll be happy.

That would make you average. Not bad! I thought that in my first year last year and almost made the top 50. I was for most of the year but didn't understand the post Vuelta season (still don't).